Migration and Heritage - (Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics) by Jana Keck (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

How did women make--and become--the news in the German-American press? This book reexamines the nineteenth-century German-language press as a central medium of migrant communication and a transregional infrastructure of textual circulation. A defining feature of this media landscape was reprinting: articles, fiction, and advertisements were copied, adapted, and redistributed across regional and national boundaries. To analyze how gender operated within this textual ecosystem of exchange, the study develops the concept of Gender Mining--a methodological framework that combines text reuse detection, classification, quantitative analysis, and close reading to trace the (in)visibility of women on and behind the pages. By systematically identifying texts by and about women and tracing their circulation across time and space, it reconstructs women's roles as editors, publishers, writers, readers, and subjects of marketing strategies. At the same time, it reflects critically on digitization and methodological pluralism in digital history, assessing both their analytical potential and their limitations.

About the Author

Jana Sina Dunz-Keck, German Historical Institute Washington, DC, USA.